Men and Women in Space

Hi Don,

I believe you start from the wrong axioms.
Space colonies won't be a carbon copy of today's advanced countries
societies, because factors like these:

(1) Numbers will be small. We are talking in terms of thousands of
pioneers, perhaps 100.000 as much for the first couple of centuries.
We are not thinking in billion-size societies of today which can
survive will all kind of wild behavoirs because there are enough
resources to waste.

(2) Pioneers won't be choseen at random. There will be a very strict
selection process in place. I guess it is easy to enter the M.I.T
or to the executive level of a big company today rather than put a
foot in a Space colony.

(3) Space colonies will avoid people with behavoir that will produce
problems. Criminals, paranoids, violent or abusive people will be
avoided, because they are potential source of trouble. Is very
likely the people they finally chose will be quite different from
the average fellow of our societies.

(4) Space settlements will be always at the edge of disaster, and
they will be managed like private companies, so they will want to
have the best human resources available.

That kind of society will be, by force, very different from today's
world.

Omar

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Don Davis"
>
> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophile"
> wrote:
>
> > I suspect (and tell me if I'm wrong about this, Don) that in
Don's
> > habitat I could eschew smooking, alcohol, any other intoxicants,
and
> > live in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage for all my adult
life, and
> > that would be just fine with the law enforcement, government,
etc.
>
> Of course members of a free society such as my space colony
society
> have the right to decide to avoid any kind of intoxicant and
pleasure
> they wish! No, the authority figures won't test people to make sure
> they are imbibing as they think they should!
>
> -snip- and THAT would be just fine with the law enforcement,
> > government, etc.
>
> Laws would be written with deliberately limited scope to cover
> specific needs, not dealing with private behavour. For every new
law
> introduced another older law must be removed to avoid clutter.
>
> > > "New states of consiousness" sound to me like a New Age
manifesto.
> > > What are you going to eat up there, colored crystals or high
> > > vibrations?
>
> You never know what people will come up with. By then most
> psychedelic drugs as we know them may well be replaced for
> consiousness exploration uses by computer neural interfaces tapping
> into the 'religious center of the brain' that is now accessed by
> meditative and ethnobotanical means.
>
> > I'm with you. But I don't think that you can guarantee "no
bigotry,"
>
> Of course, but there would be no laws codifying bigotry so far
as is
> possible.
>
> > Who said anything about disorder? I should hope that Don's no-
gun
> > cops would arrest me if I raped somebody, or if I tried to blow
a hole
> > in the bulkhead, or if I stole a bicycle.
>
> Crimes involving violence would be considered very serious.
Almost as
> serious as trying to blow a hole in the colony. People who
threatened
> the whole would have to be changed forcibly or executed, unless
there
> was a 'prison colony' they sent such folks to. There may be less
room
> for the lengthly legal contests as we see in America and as such
could
> differ in some details from the stereotyped liberal ideals,
especially
> in death penalty related issues.
>
> If not, then yeah, Don's
> > habitat is screwed (and not in the pleasant way).
>
> Whatever works!
>
> > > Wrong!!! The problem is quite simple. If you stop reproducing
you
> > > are a dead duck. You are extinct.
> >
> > See, this is what I mean. Nobody said anything about "stop
> > reproducing," but just about not breeding ourselves into abject
> > poverty. Certainly, if we just stop reproducing, we go extinct.
>
> There is a lack of perspective related to discussions of these
> issues. When birth rates decline from our present 'J curve turning
> into a spike' anomaly people worry thet we are in danger of
dwindling
> to nothing! It is highly unlikely even the richest societies will
stop
> reproducing entirely, the world is simply being changed by
consensus
> into one with less increase in crowding and thus more affluent
than it
> would have been.
> Similar thinking is applied when people bring up gay people with
> alarm as if they were a threat, often saying 'If everyone was that
way
> Humanity would die off! The relative demographics of the group in
> question have remained fairly steady over the years, several
percent,
> concentrations in 'rainbow flag flying' cities being due to
migration
> rather than per capita population increase. 'Gay Marriage' is often
> treated like a threat to marriage as a whole, as if the merits of
both
> were some kind of closed system where the validation of one is
somehow
> at the expense of the other. Both have their respective merits and
are
> not mutually exclusive to the other, the comparitively small
number of
> such unions can hardly be shown to eclipse or invalidate the
meaning
> of billions of marriages! Yet it is obsessed upon by opportunists
and
> rhetorically enlarged to the status of a world crisis.
> Incidently, gays can be thought of as the
sociological 'canaries in
> the cage' unwittingly acting as the birds carried deep underground
> into mines. Just as the canaries are first to succumb to the
poisen in
> the air warning miners to evaculate, gay people are generally the
> first to be persecuted by political and religious demagogues then
they
> seek to spread the noxious fumes of oppression around them.
>
> > > That's idiotic. If you guys in the so called FIRST world stop
having
> > > children the only think that will happen is that the THIRD
world
> > > will replace you inside your country. That's so easy to see.
>
> The process of the information age reaching every corner of the
world
> is well underway, influencing desired birth rates. What imformed
> society wants to see a world covered with Calcuttas over most of
the
> habitable surface? The saturation of media and the reduction of the
> influence of Islamic theocracies as the outcome of the ongoing war
> between radical Islam and the West will contribute to marginalizing
> societies which outlaw birth control.
> The smaller the fraction of the human race reproducing blindly
without
> regard to quality of life issues the longer the rest of the world
will
> have to establish a robust Space Migration process.
> If the world suceeds in stabalizing its population at a billion
or
> tweo people, it will be more likely to become for future space
faring
> generations a vacation destination rather than a grim example of
what